GVO

mercredi 31 mars 2010

She never stopped writing . She misses her readers , and she is still writing .Writing is life . Writing is being . Writing is everything about her life . She never understood why they want her to stop from doing it .

Now , bereft of her words ,writing has become a fight ! She 's fighting using either her pen or her keyboard .

Her weapons : a laptop , an old FUCKED UP laptop ...and some thoughts , some opinions ...

Their bullets never succeeded in impeding her ...bullet after bullet she is becoming stronger more mature ...

She is going to fight again and again , she is struggling , she will never give up .

lundi 29 mars 2010

I remember that I have discovered this website by chance in 2007 or even one year earlier . I found the idea of writing feminist hardcore comments funny and original . I wrote a comment but I did not expect that thy will publish it .But they did !

It was something like : "You think that you Fucked me but I fucked you too and believe me I got pleasure out of it more than you did "

mardi 23 mars 2010

While Social Media and citizenship journalism are flourishing allover the world, this does not seem to be the case in countries like: China, Egypt, Tunisia,Morocco or Iran . Censorship, harassment and even jail are becoming the rule over there . Here is a GVO post reporting Iranian bloggers' arrests.

Many of you know that my blog had been censored in February, 24th 2010. After some days of silence - the necessary time to recover , to heal my wounds ( It is never easy to accept the fact that someone had stolen your freedom of speech)-,I decided to blog again .I changed my blog URL: www.nightclubbeuse.blogspot.com is now www.atunisiangirl.blogspot.com

Well, people who know my blog won't recognize it . I decided to change the blog template . The text on the black one was too difficult to read . I didn't finish re-making my blog but I 'm working on it .

samedi 13 mars 2010

At the opening of the Women and Work conference March 8 in Turin, Italy, Madlen Serban, the director of the European Training Foundation, or ETF, revealed an ambitious hope for the symposium. She hoped the event, held 100 years after the first international women’s conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1910, would yield new answers, rather than just new questions, about women in the workforce in EU-partner countries.

A century later, do we really have new answers?

As one of 22 female bloggers invited to a pre-conference workshop by international communications specialist Silvia Cambie, I set out to find out.

The invitation came along with the task of addressing three major issues of concern to the ETF, and to the EU at large – women’s transition from school to work, entrepreneurship and social inclusion. In the weeks leading up to the conference, questions and thoughts were shared on the Women and Work Ning group (womenandwork.ning.com), a virtual hub linking bloggers and writers in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Egypt, Georgia, Jordan, Lebanon, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Russia, Tunisia and eight more countries.

The day before the keynote address given by Jung Chang, author of “Wild Swans” and the first person from the People’s Republic of China to be awarded a Ph.D. from a British university, we sat in a large circle staring out onto a snow-covered terrace and cracked the ice by doing teambuilding and creativity exercises. Having all met virtually online, it was time to work together in person.

It turns out we all had something in common besides being mostly women. (The two male participants had spent a good deal of their working life trying to solve social problems and gender inequality.) It wasn’t that we were all bloggers, either, because as it turned out, only a handful of the participants had begun blogging in the early 2000s, while 10 or more had just started this year or were yet to start a blog. The commonality was that social media had brought us together.

Different vocations, same vision

Through Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs, Cambie curated a group of people addressing issues of women’s empowerment internationally. Lara Aharonian creates a support network for women in Yerevan at the Women’s Resource Center. Mari Sharashidze in Tbilisi enables women’s access to resources and information. Vedrana Spajic-Vrkas in Zagreb is stringent about curriculum and how it addresses gender imbalance as a professor in the faculty of humanities and social sciences. Elena Fedyashina plays a major role in furthering women business leaders with the nonprofit partnership The Committee of 20 in Moscow, while Fatma Mokhtar speaks to issues of equality and egalitarianism as a researcher for Nazra Association for Feminist Studies in Cairo.

By contrast, my own blog and Twitter stream based out of İzmit, and my own work about unraveling identity as it relates to art and domesticity, seemed a quiet hum amid the thundering chorus of powerful women I met.

Work groups hashed out tough questions about helping entrepreneurially inclined women develop self-esteem, and how to de-gender jobs by focusing on skills rather than sex. I suggested throwing out elimination of gender-specific language from job postings in Turkey as a first step.

Live Twitter streams detailed problems and suggestions throughout the day.

Tunisian Lina Ben Mhenni, coordinator of the captivating and highly controversial campaign “We are all Laila,” founded by Eman Abd El Rahman in Egypt, described herself as a blogger fighting for freedom of expression in her country. Journalist Jasmine Elnadeem of the Al-Ahram newspaper commented on specific tasks needed to be done to enable gender equality: train private and governmental media to involve human rights in their work and start role-modeling at early age in schools to spread awareness.

Strategic recommendations

Suggestions by the bloggers were made to five distinct groups: policy makers, public institutions such as the ETF, educators, employers and individuals. Given that all of the countries represented in my work group face hidden cultural, not legal, discrimination against women educationally, we suggested gender training for teachers and media professionals, multi-platform integrated approaches and mentoring programs to reach girls beginning at the elementary-school level and continuing through university.

We emphasized mandatory parental leave, not just maternity leave, additional support for single-parent mothers and a rigorous overhaul of educational materials that would tip the scales toward equality rather than gender imbalance. A quickly made video tackled four areas: work-life balance, social media, gender equality and role modeling. The video was uploaded to YouTube to be broadcast live the next day in front of academics, policy makers and women from more than 40 countries. It would be a delight to share were the service not banned in Turkey.

Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, joined the conference via video, arguing that concern for women is not a luxury during the economic crisis, nor is it something to address once other problems are solved. The potential of women needs to be addressed, and the EU cannot afford to ignore it, she said. More explicitly, Reding argued that the only difference between men and women is that women can give birth, and that for equal rights to be obtained, equal responsibility must be shared. While I cannot say that is a sentiment all will agree with, I do agree with her that the emancipation of women globally requires men to be full participants.

Boundary breaking

Dining the first night in Turin, at a restaurant specializing in seafood and veal, I turned to my companion and discovered she was Armenian, as was the woman sitting next to her. While chatting about the egalitarianism of Facebook and Twitter, suggesting that the Internet may be one of the few safe places for women to reveal their true thoughts, we decided to take a picture. Here we were, two Armenian women and one American married to a Turk flaunting our friendship in the face of Turkey’s complaints about the Obama administration’s lack of resolve to block the Armenian “genocide” resolution last week.

As I discovered in Turin, when it comes to the personal, peace and equality takes precedent over the political. One hundred years later, there are new answers, but there is also a very important question yet to be answered: Will policy makers heed our advice?

On the occasion of the International Women’s Day and to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on 8 March, the European Training Foundation (ETF) organized on Sunday and Monday, 7th and 8th March 2010 in Turin a conference entitled Women and Work. A conference that gathered 120 participants from 40 countries. I have been invited to take part in this conference.

I arrived to Turin on Saturday 6th 2010 and had the opportunity to have dinner with many female bloggers from many countries .It was an opportunity to break ice in preparation for a group work the day after.

After the dinner, I was so happy to discover that my room had a view on the whole city of Turin.

I was tired and I slept for 8 hours (an exception). In the morning I was so happy to discover that it was snowing.

After a good breakfast, three teams of women bloggers and students of mixed nationalities from around Europe, worked together to present their suggestions about women in the workplace to policy makers from 29 countries surrounding the EU. Three major subjects were discussed:

1-Transition from school to work.

2-Entrepreunership.

3-Social inclusion and gender equality.

During the whole day, bloggers and students worked together on brainstorming possible innovative solutions to different problems facing women as to the three subjects listed above. The debate started a couple of months ago thanks to the initiative of Silvia Cambié, head of Chanda Communications and an expert on social media and this on ning network. In fact, women bloggers and social media activists had discussed subjects such as: a more inclusive definition of work (to comprise women in informal sector and households, social entrepreneurship, education as a tool to prevent conflict and promote peace and stability, etc.Through face to face talks, tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, female bloggers from different countries issued a list of recommendations on the ways and methods to insure gender equality on the labor market .The result was three interesting videos made by three wonderful teams and presented at the second day of the event to policy makers and representatives of NGOs.

On the second day, Madlen Madlen Serban, the director of the European Training Foundation opened the conference to express her hopes for the conference to reach the stage offinding solutions and recommendations to women problems rather than just exposing problems. The second speaker Marco Gilli (Polytechnic of Turin) started his speech by presenting the palace ( Valentino palace) where the conference was held , explaining that it serves also as the school of architecture , to move to giving some statistics about women attendance and achievements in Turin Polytechnic through history .The third speaker Salvatore Collucia (Vice Rector of the University of Turin) talked mostly about the collaboration between his university and the ETF, giving also some statistics about women’s achievements at Turin University.

After that a video showing the speech of Viviane Reding,Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights , Citizenship and Gender Equality was presented. She explained that even in times of crisis concern for women is a priority. The potential of women needs to be addressed, and the EU cannot afford to ignore it.

The Chinese author of “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China”: Jung Chang captivated the audience with her story . She talked about the pains of her grandmother in times where women were xupposed to” have long hair but short intelligence”. She showed the shoes her grandmother used to wear when foot binding had been practiced in China. She also mentioned her story and that of her mother under the Mao’s rule. A success story as the writer succeeded in leaving China and studying in Britain.

Outi Karkkainen and Jean Marc Castejon (ETF ) gave a presentation entitled “Transition from school to work-the case of Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia . This presentation had been highly criticized by one of the three Tunisian participants , Ms Amel Bouchamaoui Hammami(First vice president of CNFCE : Chambre Nationale Femmes Chefs d’Entreprises Tunis) , who argued that Tunisia should not be included in the MENA region as to women achievements !!

The two other main subjects of the conference which are : Entrepreneurship and Social Inclusion and Gender Equality were respectively discussed by : Efka Heder ,Director South East European Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning along with Dragica Jerkov , President of the Adriatic Ionian SEE Business Women Association , and Adriana Luciano from the University of Turin.

After a good lunch, the afternoon sessions started with a speech about “Globalization and Flexibility by Luciano Gallino, Professor Emeritus of sociology at Turin University. Then the videos prepared by women bloggers the day before were presented by Silvia Cambie .After that an open dialogue started under the moderation of Marc Gramberger (Prospex).

In the evening all the participants had been invited to a dinner in the Teatro Regio and to a wonderful theatre piece Clara Schaumann in the Teatro Piccolo Regio .

The conference has been very interesting, many recommendations and advices to improve women’s situation and to reach gender equality have been issued but the inflammatory question is : will decisions makers hear us?

What I enjoyed most is the Italian food and wine, and meeting so many people , exchanging a plethora of ideas and discussing FREELY !Visiting the city of Turin has been really wonderful!